Ever so slowly the men and women who make up the Sloatsburg Volunteer Community Ambulance Corp are building a first rate emergency first responder outfit that can answer most any emergency.

Last year Thomas Lorenz III earned his Eagle Scout wings with a project at the SVAC that involved a complete renovation of the entire upstairs. Suddenly, the SVAC had a second-story meeting room that now hosts local scout meetings and other events.

Now the Sloatsburg Ambulance Corp is a finalist to win a coveted grand prize AmbuBus® conversion kit from First Line Technology, which develops, manufactures and supplies materials and equipment to first responders. One of 25 finalist currently competing in a First Line Technology Facebook contest, SVAC is up against other first responders from all across the country. The grand prize is the conversion kit that can transform any type of transit bus or larger vehicle into an ambulance for up to 18 people.

This is where the social and media connect with you. To win, SVAC needs to garner votes on First Line’s contest page. The process is simple: go to the First Line Vote Here page and in the upper right corner above the big purple arrow click the large Like button. A list of contest finalists should appear below. Find Sloatsburg Volunteer Ambulance Corp and vote for them.

Voting goes through September 20, with the winner scheduled to be announced October 1.

“What caught our attention was the sincerity of the nomination,” said Jennie Williams, Marketing Manager at the Chantilly, VA-based First Line. Williams said that the online nomination process contained two parts — one part related to how the AmbBus® would be used by the organization, with the second part concerned how much the organization “deserved” the conversion kit.

SVAC’s nomination hit all the right notes.

There is currently not a single resource like this between the 3 counties we border. We see less than 10 MCI’s a year but a tool like this could go mutual aid to MCI’s all over, it would be a great asset and would help us do our job to the best of our abilities providing superior patient care with the most state of the art equipment. I believe that we need to do more in preparing for such incidents considering we live 30 minutes outside of NYC and are 45 minutes from multiple smaller cities in Orange County, this AmbuBus would be an incredible asset to our arsenal of EMT’s who want to get out there and save lives. — excerpt from part of SVCAC nomination essay

The volunteers at SVAC did their part. First Line Technology is doing theirs. Now, the local community must put shoulder to the wheel and do its part: log in to the Facebook contest page and vote (only people not biz pages can vote).